Frankenstein and the Physiognomy of Desire

John M. Hill

American Imago, 32 (Winter) 1975, 335-358

{335} Beginning with the commonplace that Frankenstein is
a family romance, I will argue that its essential theme is promethean sin -- a theme
uniting an incredible complex of psycho-biographical motives. I
will trace a few strands of what I take as the dominant motive,
not because the rest proves incidental, but because an adequate
treatment of psychological material in Frankenstein
requires book- length scope. The dominant incestuous root for
Promethean sin seems to take hold in uncompromising psychic
wishes for exclusive love, and in possession of the mother --
the source of first love. Commentators have noted odd familial
relations in Mary
Shelley's novel, but they usually avoid its psychological
density or mistake the motives involved.1 In this study, I hope to expose
some of that material, begin exploring Mary Shelley's deep
motives, and acknowledge her wisdom in these matters.
Principally, I will draw on general Freudian suggestions and
allow the novel to fulfill or qualify the cogency of such
awareness in its narrative progress. To astonishing extent,
Mary Shelley {336} half knows much of what her fiction is
about. In this, she knows more than her obsessive character,
Victor Frankenstein, even as he approximates self-recognition.
And the novel tells us more than even Mary can countenance.

Paradoxically, Frankenstein has yet to receive close
scrutiny in any of its psychological aspects by those most
attracted to that material.2 Even readily explicable
psychological terrain is unexplored if not unnoted territory.
Various formulas of incest wish or obsession with paternity have
been offered, but they eventually prove unsatisfactory when
faced with the novel's many developments. We need a contextual
orientation in meeting this novel, especially if we attempt any
of its depths, even as we recognize that the complex unconscious
it harbors cannot be fully plumbed. As with Frankenstein, the
attentive reader also encounters his creature "among the
precipices of an inaccessible mountain."3 To attempt the unconscious and
force an unmasking of its strange nature is "to overtake the
winds or confine a mountain stream with a straw" (p. 75). We finally cannot
altogether parse the deep language of the unconscious, even as
Victor Frankenstein wants a language to express his hell. But
we remain priviledged: as readers we see the obliquities of
desire Mary Shelley spins out; and we can begin tracing a few of
them into designs of half-knowledge, if only we allow the novel
to speak what it will. Then, perhaps, we may transcend formula,
engage something of the evil spirits and new deities encountered
by Mary Shelley in this her most profound descent "into the
{337} remotest caverns of mind."4 Knowledge of
what our desires will sometimes bespeak, awareness of
subconscious struggles for exclusive love, and recognition of
what Mary would require for health of mind and heart should come
of such engagement.

II

One evening after talk of ghosts, reanimation and galvanism, Mary Shelley finds
herself possessed by an uncanny imagination. She recalls being
"guided" beyond the usual bounds of reverie or day-dream, having
received as gifts a series of images. With "acute mental vision"
she sees "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the
thing he had put together": a half-animated, hideous corpse or"
cradle of life" (xi). This
account, from her 1831 preface, is known to all students of the
novel. What we have not seen, perhaps because of its
familiarity, is the purport of Mary's explanation. She attempts
to indicate how much the central event in her fiction is a
personal nightmare, a woman's dream.5. She has {338} created a fiction out
of nightmare. Indeed, the terrible figures of dream are
subjected to aesthetic controls, elaboration, palliating disguise
and finally purgation. In the process, if we know how to look,
much of what those figures signify is revealed. Their story is
spoken, as with dream, in the oddities of expression cast in
relief against conscious awareness. Through such speaking Mary
achieves a critical distance from the promethean material of both
her nightmare and her fiction.

The unhallowed self projected in dream is displaced through
fiction from the waking self. There Mary would tame what
consciousness finds repugnant even as the artist pursues
structures for the expression of same. By looking at the
progress of this in the novel we discover interconnected
domains: especially that of the psychic life which inhabits us
in relation to the waking world of civilized affections we
inhabit in turn. Frankenstein, alone throughout the novel,
negates every important tie of that waking world in the pursuit
of his desires. Everything he pursues is destructive of
community, cooperation and the great public affections of
civilization. He even destroys the very family within which all his
sublime pleasures are nourished. In doing so he destroys the
sublimations of ideal family bonds and confronts us with the
absolutism of secret desire. The problem posed here is
momentous: how do we, at what cost, reconcile our most intense
wishes with moderated life among men in open community? Mary
answers by dramatizing obsessive regression in Frankenstein's
life. She reveals the cost of failure to curb wishes of the
unconscious. Implicitly, we must live a comparative moderation
of our desires if we want sanity. To avoid self-destruction, we
must accept less than we would should our unconscious gain
motive access to the powers of waking mind. The entire focus on
Frankenstein, then, is critical if sympathetic, negative and
revealing. And interestingly much is done in the fiction in
modes familiar to psychoanalysis: through dream and
recollection of childhood.

Turning first to dream, essentially to dream within dream, we
gain enduring clues as to the significance of Frankenstein's
creature. Having awakened his creature, Frankenstein flees,
{339} his two-year pursuit yielding an experience of revulsion.
But instead of a sleep of forgetfulness, which he consciously
desires, he dreams of a blooming Elizabeth met with in the
streets of Ingolstadt. She
is his dear foster-sister, whom he has not seen for two years.
He embraces her, kisses her, and instantly her lips assume "the
hue of death": "her features appeared to change, and I thought I
held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms." Then awake, in
horror he beholds "the wretch -- the miserable monster whom I
have created" (pp. 56-57).
Is this the monster of incest? Yes, and more: "The wretch" is
the embodied life of Frankenstein's desire to possess the
mother, which has as its waking focus an intense possession of
Elizabeth, the substitute mother, one's own peer, whom Victor
long ago considered his exclusive possession and whose
existence, he later feels, is bound up in his (p. 87). That he
should dream of meeting, embracing and kissing Elizabeth after
fleeing from his quickened creature suggests a double
consciousness: waking thoughts flee the desires his creature
manifests -- as signified by its physiognomy -- and which
Frankenstein has brought forth from the charnel house of his
unconscious. But the real wish gains partial beauty in dreams,
yet under horrific censorship. Upon awakening, Frankenstein
sees his creature, the now independent life he has brought
forth. But all he sees is physiognomy invested with his desire
-- a physical correlation for his deep wishes projected, under
censorship through consciousness, onto the other.

The sequence of images, one fading into another, the third
grinning at him in waking sight, defines the objects of desire
and the actuated desire itself. That Frankenstein would embrace
the mother in Elizabeth, the dead mother, gives us a parameter
for his motives in creating life: he is possessed by the
subconscious need to repossess, that is, recover the mother.
Indeed, he would recreate her for himself. This last desire is
the more primitive of the two: its roots antedate the mother's
literal death and manifest themselves in a childhood urgency to
penetrate the secrets of heaven and earth. The key in all of
this is a desire to be loved, but loved alone, exclusively, and
therein to virtually possess the source of love. Such
possession would inherently prevent any possibility of the loss
of love {340} or denial of love by the object of love. Such a
motive may suit the child who feels motherless or denied,
perhaps like the motherless child in Mary Shelley.6 Through
Frankenstein she may live out her desires for the mother she
never had, even as she gains detachment from them in an
authorial otherness productive of wisdom. I think we can see
enough in her life that would call for the recovery of love and
the objects of love, crucially denied by death. Not only is her own mother a creature
of fantasy and image, dead before Mary is three weeks old, but
her baby girl has died in the year preceding the writing of
Frankenstein. That death gave rise to a hopeless dream
in which Mary revives a merely cold baby by the fireside.7 She adjusts to
this loss, much as to more troubling deaths a few years later.
But in Frankenstein I think the sex of the second monster
is not gratuitous. It is the female which Victor's creation,
the creature of desire drawn from nightmare, demands for
itself. Here, however, something fails Victor and perhaps Mary
as well. The second creature, if realized into waking life,
would bring wish and reality into shockingly close
correspondence, even for fictional dream. So the fantasy,
coming too close to consciousness, is prevented or aborted.
Along the way much is revealed about the psyche Mary has
invested in her central character.

Several times after William's death, especially when
Frankenstein sees his creature in the space of a lightning
flash, he nearly acknowledges its psychological relation to
himself. He has already half-betrayed himself to an unwitting
Clerval, his devoted friend (this during a fit of demonic
possession {341} [p. 60]). And now he considers the creature
"nearly" his own vampire "spirit cut loose from the grave and
forced to destroy all that was dear to me" (p. 74). A little later he
recalls wandering "like an evil spirit, for I had committed
deeds of mischief beyond description horrible, and more, much
more (I persuaded myself) was yet behind" (p. 86). The language reflects
Frankenstein's bare hold on a delusion of difference between
himself and his creature ("nearly," "I persuaded myself"). It
also reveals depths: the vampire spirit is "forced" by
something deeper. "More was yet behind," as if no melodrama of
gothic possession can
quite fathom what has happened. Perhaps we can begin a relevant
descent -- beneath the gothic horror of vampires and evil
spirits -- by tracing the obliquities of desire revealed in
Frankenstein's childhood, at first blindly by himself. One
element has already been anticipated: the need for exclusive
love. Recovery of the dead purposes a recovery of the mother;
recovery of the mother means absolute possession and therein
total love in return. It is this which provokes oddity in
Frankenstein's recollections of familial love, especially his
professions of complete happiness in the face of contradictory
memories.

III

Frankenstein begins his story with an account of his mother's
father. He might have begun anywhere in early childhood, even
at the point of first enthusiasm for knowledge. Indeed, he
tells Walton -- a kindred figure redeemed by connections to family, community and humane
feeling -- that the narrative of childhood is an attempt to
relate those events which led "to my aftertale of misery, for
when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion
which afterwards ruled my destiny I find it arise, like a
mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources" (p. 38). We then move to
Frankenstein's thirteenth year and, presumably, his idea of
"sources" -- his predilection for natural philosophy. It seems
he does not know what to mention prior to self-conscious pursuit
of nature's secrets, and so he begins with a vision of mother
before she became a wife, indeed, while still a poverty-
stricken orphan at her dead father's bedside. If we {342} grant
this
.beginning as fortuitous we have still to explain the various
leaps, shifts, disjunctions and repetitions which follow in
Frankenstein's narrative. Perhaps by noting them we can
articulate those "ignoble and almost forgotten sources"
brilliantly intuited by a novelist whose ego includes several
oblique cries for itself.

The mother, Caroline, is the daughter of the father's friend and
peer, Beaufort, a recluse in his broken fortune. In marrying
Caroline, then, the father essentially marries a faithful
daughter. It is as if Mary herself -- who treats
father-daughter incest in Mathilda -- calls out in much
of her fiction, 'Father, don't marry her, marry me' -- this to
Godwin, her beloved father
(who, incidently, has severe financial problems during Mary's
adolescence). The her in question is Godwin's second wife,
Mary's stepmother from the age of four onward. An image of
Mrs. Godwin will appear later in the novel as the character
Justine's unaccountably cruel mother.8 Caroline, poor and orphaned, is
repeated in Elizabeth (the foster-child Victor Frankenstein
later embraces in his dream). The one reincarnates the other.
For that matter, Elizabeth virtually rings celestial in her
angelic being. Both bespeak a double image: the idealized
daughter and the angelic mother. As daughter-image, they
bespeak Mary the
"abandoned" child, sent to Scotland at the request of a harried
and jealous mother-in-law.9 Such literal "abandonment,"
however, doubtless follows upon years of psychological
resentment and feelings of {343} displacement as Mrs. Godwin
takes her place in the father's house, bringing with her two
favored children from a previous marriage. Mary would have life
with father -- which she had for part of her early childhood --
and eliminate the odious Mrs. Godwin (along with
those.children). But the melodrama in Frankenstein immediately
reaches deeper than a girl's vengeful daydreams in love with her
father. Caroline repeated in Elizabeth is chosen by the mother
not the father and "given" to Victor Frankenstein -- who thinks
of her as his "more than
sister." Befriended by the mother, she is possessed by the
son.10 The
mother also befriends Justine, the third image of Mary and
perhaps the closest to a disguised biographical sketch.11 Justine in
turns loves Caroline, not her actual mother, but a true mother.
And she so closely imitates the mother in manner and behavior
that Elizabeth twice mentions it in a letter to Frankenstein.
When we look closely we see everything revolving around the
mother -- including the father's protective attentions. The
relations depicted in the melodrama are characterized by filial
devotion. But underneath that melodrama, providing much of its
odd emotional intensity, lies a sexual infatuation which Helene
Deutsch understands as presupposing "a strong persistence of the
mother tie."12 Sexual infatuation would here
become homosexual did it not reach to such deep levels that in
Frankenstein's creature's profession of love for the sleeping
Justine we have a primitive sexual wish which has no particular
male or female orientation. {344}

To summarize these relationships: the bad mother wants
replacing; the good daughter would be mother, wife and daughter
to the father. This requires identification with the beloved
mother. But that identification is a double fantasy: based on
psychic wish and total loss of such a mother from one's life;
which in turn touches a psychic cavern (to use a Romantic metaphor) within
Mary's unconscious. She enters and finds herself in the
presence of infantile desire to possess the mother,
exclusively. That desire gains embodiment in a nightmare of
recalling the dead to life, of creating life from death. In
relation to that nightmare, the desire to take the mother's
place with the father, and evict the bad mother, is real enough
(even half-conscious) but only a disguise mechanism. It
represents the complete introversion of the desired, but
idealized mother into the self. Thus the account of the
Beauforts does not so much prepare us for the father's
character, as Frankenstein claims: it establishes the good
mother's centrality -- to a version of which in Justine the
creature of desire suddenly professes its desperate love.
Taking all the mother
figures together we have the following: Caroline is the
daughter as mother; Elizabeth is the mother as babe, rendered
one's peer, therein to be treasured and possessed; Justine is
the mother's daughter, the seeker for the idealized mother in
rejection of the actual mother, and the mother imitated.

But we anticipate too much. Frankenstein recalls, "I, their
eldest child, was born at Naples" (p. 33). Moreover, "I remained
for several years their only child," born to a "fair exotic" of
a sheltered mother. The emphasis on "I" is not telling in
itself; but when compounded with assertions of priority of place
and exclusive status despite the parents' wish for a daughter,
it becomes notable. "For a long time I was their only care"
(p. 33); "I continued their
single offspring" (p. 33); "I
was their plaything and their idol, and something better --
their child" (p. 33); "they
fulfilled their duty towards
me" -- these suggest more than neutral memory. They may recall
Mary's own early childhood with Godwin, before he remarried. In
a significant sense she was the only "child": Godwin's and Mary Wollstonecraft's only
offspring {345} (her mother had another child, by a former
lover). Moreover, Frankenstein does not require such emphases
to tell the story he understands -- only Mary does. She locates
one "forgotten source" in early childhood, in the child's sense
of exclusive adoration by its parents, without competitors. But
even here all is not complete bliss, as Frankenstein would
imagine. He forever betrays himself -- the role Mary gives
Victor's memory, while she remains uncognizant of deep
implications in his betrayals even as she anticipates their
eventual ripening into full-scale obsession.

Frankenstein emphasizes himself, alone, exclusively loved by his
parents. He notes their parental fund of love; he remembers
that they loved each other, yet "seemed to draw inexhaustible
stores of affection . . . to bestow . . .
upon me" (p. 33). Much lies
behind that seemed. Mary intuits the child's attentive
suspicion. In part she no doubt fulfills a wish that Godwin and his second wife had
together bestowed "inexhaustible stores of affection" upon her
(which Mrs. Godwin apparently did not); in part she demands
absolute love, that is, the primitive child in her does; in part
she may touch subtle resentments toward her dead mother for
abandoning her, for remaining Godwin's beloved -- he kept a
portrait of her in his study which did not come down when he
remarried. But attentive suspicion controls all of these
factors: the child wonders what the parents keep to themselves
("Much as they were attached to each other"), when love will
diminish or be withdrawn. We already know that the father
shelters the mother, actively protects her as a gardener would
from "every rougher wind" (p.
33), and for whom? Certainly for himself, which is part of
his benign character. The child, however, may interpret or
suspect otherwise. Sensing a parental attachment exclusive of
him, he may see the father negatively, as a threatening guardian
of the desirable mother. In the novel none of this becomes
overt. Indeed, the primitive child accepts less than he perhaps
would, but only as long as he remains the exclusive child and
center of parental attention. Frankenstein remarks that
parental duties were fulfilled toward him, as if such were his
due, as if feelings of neglect or incipient injustice would
otherwise break the surface of {346} familial harmony. "I
received a lesson of patience, of charity, and of self-control,
I was guided by a silken cord that all seemed but one train of
enjoyment to me" (p. 33).

Noting such lessons if nothing troubled one's consciousness of
things would be odd. Of course, those lessons anticipate their
failure in Mary's
planning of the narrative, as well as in Frankenstein's. But
they suggest more than convenient background or preparation for
tragedy. Later Frankenstein will speak of a superlatively happy
childhood with his ideal parents. But he will also speak of
gratitude assisting "the development of filial love" (p. 37). "Assist" would not be
necessary if all was more than happy, if no ambivalence is felt
toward parents who keep some "attachment" between themselves
undivulged to the child. Perhaps the singularly loved child
nevertheless feels abandoned in some way, and his intense desire
to know from what he has been excluded leads to a desire to know the secrets of
nature. Such a deflection from his real aim could derive from
the strength of the parents' mutual attachment and any paternal
threat sensed or imagined by the child. In this we would expect
hostility toward the father, especially as the pursuit o[ those
secrets gains force. The apparent lack of a strong ambivalence
toward the father in Frankenstein, then, could prove dismaying.
Mary's deep concern for the mother- child relation, along with
her conscious need for love between daughter and father, may
account for this. Yet the primitive child in the daughter would
compete for the mother, imagining herself the beloved child.
Perhaps Victor Frankenstein's sex reflects a disguise borne of
identification with the father in a partial attempt to take his
place. At least it disguises Mary's desires by projecting them
onto an eventually obsessed son.

The novel does not fully resolve this problem, but neither is it
completely mute. Twice Frankenstein implicitly blames his
benign father, especially with reference to pursuit of alchemical writings, and
nowhere is he especially a male child, a boy among boys. The
first of these points is more important because it justifies the
child's sense of things: he sees himself as inexplicably
impassioned, something the father neglects; the child then
thinks of himself as abandoned to {347} struggle as he will by a
blameworthy father. A somewhat similar response comes from the
creature as it prepares to frame Justine, blaming her as the
source of its crime, its murder of William. But a closer
connection exists in Walton's account of his desire to undertake
voyages of exploration, which the father explicitly forbade. In
this case the father is not blameworthy; he is openly
hostile.

Now the silken cord of restraint and seeming enjoyment noted
above becomes sensible: it marks a substratum of resentment, of
feelings of exclusion and near abandonment tolerated only as
long as one is the only "child" (the sole child of the
parents). The discovery of Elizabeth in a peasant's home
threatens this compromise; she, however, is dealt with by an
additional adjustment, becoming a mother-peer-possession in
Frankenstein's imagination. She is a fantasy sister, "my more
than sister, since till death she was to be mine only" (p. 34). This is a displacement
of attitudes borne of later developments to early childhood.
And it marks Frankenstein's close relationship to the fantasy
sister. He never either desires or identifies with a male
peer: even his boyhood friend, Clerval, is mainly important as
a nurse later in the fiction. Long after the mother's death,
and upon inquiry from his father, Frankenstein confesses to
loving no one else alive more than Elizabeth. (I think "alive"
is telling in virtue of his nightmare: of those alive he both
loves and identifies most with Elizabeth; but his love here is
only next best to his desire for the beloved mother she
reincarnates). In this sense Elizabeth becomes a means of
circumventing the father-mother attachment and thereby gaining
sole possession of the mother. A potential threat is
transformed by extraordinary possessiveness into a consolation.
Yet even as consolation Elizabeth reminds the subconscious of
the true object: the fantasy mother who would deny her child
nothing, and whose image exists only in the dissolving spectres
of nightmare.

Victor has Elizabeth, but his desires grow nevertheless. Perhaps
each consolation only feeds the depths of desire it would
mitigate. Suddenly we are told that Elizabeth "busied herself
with following the ariel creations of the poets" and
contemplated "the magnificent appearances of things," while
{348} Frankenstein remembers being "deeply smitten with the thirst for knowledge" (p. 36). Elizabeth's interests
are shadows of Frankenstein's benignly pursued, perhaps
reflecting Mary's preoccupations as an adolescent girl in
Scotland.13
Frankenstein may represent thirsts Mary would never acknowledge
as part of her past or present, but which doubtless underlie her
interest in the appearances of things.14 Frankenstein is a figure out of
Mary's nightmare; but his biography is a secondary invention
from which Mary distances herself, and through which she deals
with the desires he embodies. He ascribes his thirst for
knowledge to his "ardour" -- a curious ascription of one emotion
to another. Yet nothing in the novel is more suggestive for
Frankenstein than his "ardour," and the word therefore holds
portents for us. It differentiates him from kindred spirits,
and its repeated use in obsessive contexts recalls its ancient
connotation: a fierce and evil desire, while to consciousness
it retains the modern sense of a noble passion. In
Frankenstein's case the aura of the word is uncanny, never
innocent. He is possessed by his ardour, which leads him to
thirst for knowledge beneath the appearances of things, and to
apply himself thereto with strange intensity. Elizabeth is
satisfied with ariel shapes and magnificent appearances -- not
so with Frankenstein. Clerval pursues the moral relations of
things and seeks his place in a high arena among similarly
minded men -- not so with Frankenstein, despite occasional
remarks to the contrary. He dislikes crowds, prefers a
secluded, even reclusive life, chooses a few dear friends, but
remains a separate reclusive barely tempered by Elizabeth's
benign presence. And what does he pursue beneath the
appearances of {349} things? He distrusts seemings, perhaps
especially that first seeming, his parents' "inexhaustible
stores of affection," and later the seeming pleasures of a
silken cord of lessons. What is denied him? Why does he feel
sullen? Neither Frankenstein nor Mary clearly knows the point
of those recollections. But the novel whispers their purport.
"The world was to me a secret which I desired to divine" (p. 36). Causes, laws in
themselves are not objects of rapture: only as they are
uncovered, as they are part of the hidden and the secret. What,
the child asks without knowing it, do my parents keep from me in
their attachment to themselves? What in their attachment to
each other? What are their secrets? How can I recover the
mother who kept no distance between herself and me, who was not
the father's wife? Elizabeth, the orphaned peer, the "wife"
without a husband, the "mother" without a father, becomes the
waking embodiment of such a mother -- the saintly "shrine
dedicated lamp" to the possessing self in Frankenstein. Victor,
moreover, is her husbandman, not the father. We may now see the
alchemical pursuit of the
secrets of heaven and earth as an obsession with secrets
possessed by the parents, a desire to break their accord of
exclusion, thereby repossessing the mother and her sole
attentions. This is Victor's ardour, his heated, alchemical
passion. The full birth of such desire into waking day is
Frankenstein's creature, who eventually demands a sexual
partner, who whispers to a sleeping Justine: "'Awake, fairest,
thy lover is near -- he who would give his life but to obtain
one look of affection . . . awake'" (p. 137). How
much would Mary have given to break the accord between her
father and Mrs. Godwin? How much more would she have given to
obtain affection from her ideal mother, the beautiful Mary
Wollstonecraft?

Despite Frankenstein's remembrance of an idyllic childhood, the
material of that childhood forms a queerly connected whole of
contradictory feelings and confounded recollections.
Immediately prior to a recollection of happiness, Frankenstein
hints at the reclusive child he was, suggests a dark temper,
later a violent temper. Were it not for Elizabeth he would have
become sullen and rough in his ardour. Mary works intuitively
with her character, and such work has led to a truism of {350}
Frankenstein criticism which holds that Frankenstein lacks self-
knowledge and any sense of responsibility toward his creature.
The signs of inner disturbance are not recognized for what they
are by the narrating "patient." But then how can anyone other
than a morally piggish critic expect a figure such as
Frankenstein to be given full recognition and take full
responsibility for the demons of his unconscious? Even his
creature, much aware of the acts it commits, cannot fathom the
depths of passion which urge vengeance. The creature feels
mastered, much as Frankenstein's imagined vampire spirit is
forced by something deeper. We should, then, take
Frankenstein's vagaries to heart: they indicate delusion,
ignorance and helplessness as much in his life as in that of the
creature's.

Although the creature murders William and frames Justine, it
cannot conceive of itself as other than good, as other than
benign.15
Similarly, Frankenstein remembers a childhood of bliss, of
knowledge gained, nature explored and Elizabeth possessed as a
dear companion. Essentially he remembers his desires as good in
themselves and good in their satisfactions. He overlooks
untoward remembrances much as his creature dismisses murderous
acts -- those momentary aberrations born of painful
frustration. Neither has full knowledge of himself or of the
other. But each expresses a truth: the deep wishes of our
unconscious are oriented toward unalloyed goods. In consequence
they can only be good wishes. Indeed, how can psychic desire
conceive of itself as other than good since its object is
good?

Granting this as underlying the novel's Godwinian idealism in the
conception of the creature as a natural man, what do we make of
the murders? The creature justifies itself and even assumes
full responsibility for deeds of vengeance, which it also finds
searing of heart. Yet it cannot altogether answer for itself,
especially as it too feels mastered, or ascribes {351} the
source of murder to the object of desire. And perhaps we can do
little better than the creature in our rationalizations as we
hazard the depths of this doctrinally influenced fiction. But I
think the attempt is worthwhile, and has already yielded
something of the novel's psychodynamic.

William, the first victim, sees the creature as an ogre who
would devour him. He rejects the creature's friendly advances
and calls on his father's name in defense. The creature thinks
Victor is meant -- "'you belong to him'" -- and takes its
revenge. Bitter failure nourishes destruction: "'I too can
create desolation; my enemy is not invulnerable'" (p. 137). The desolate,
abandoned and vilified soul turns murderous. This, an overt
melodrama, expresses the latent thought of sullen impulses. But
beneath latent thought is deep wish, which brings the wretch to
create desolation. Rejected in love, in family and
companionship, the creature is an outsider, the impulsive child
who feels excluded from the parents' mutual attachment --
especially from the father's possession of the mother (the
creature has already been denied love from humans, especially
from a beautiful woman, whose affection it would have secured by
befriending a blind old man -- her father). His response is to
eliminate whomever would call in kinship on the simultaneously
beloved and hated father. William, in the extreme moment, is
perceived as unbearably priviledged -- exactly what one would
want for oneself. Moreover, he is the mother surrogate's
darling, something Frankenstein knows before the independent
creature meets William (perhaps this reflects Mary's ambivalence
toward William, the only off-spring of Godwin and Mrs. Godwin.
The sweet William is also Mary's babe, her second child with Shelley. Godwin's William,
of course, can be seen as unbearably priviledged, loved by the
foster mother). In calling upon the child's double adversary --
he who withholds love and keeps the mother (in relation to his
creature Frankenstein does both) -- the creature responds
appropriately on all levels of identification. Afflicted as
Frankenstein is, his desire would be revenged on such a father
and kill if not devour the rival, especially a rival in love, a
boy who was Caroline's "youngest darling" as well as Justine's
(the motif of oral hostility may {352} reflect archaic sources
of desire).16 Significantly, Frankenstein
receives an important letter from Elizabeth, in which William is
dotingly mentioned, after miserable failure in the outcome of
his too successful creation.17

Justine is a complete innocent. The creature frames her for a
rejection not made, but which it reasonably expects. Convicted
by circumstantial evidence -- much as the creature thinks only
appearances convict it -- Justine's case mocks the father's law
and, by implication, the hated bad father who would deny one
access to love.18 The surrogate mother is {353}
sacrificed out of maliciousness, then, toward the father (who
urged faith in the justice of Geneva's laws), as if to say:
'here, you take her, kill her as I know you will whereas I would
love her.' The creature is William's ogre; such a father is the
creature's, whom it disdains in consciousness. Yet we need
further entry into this melodrama. Justine is a version of
Mary, which requires more explanation of her significance than
we have just given.

As an innocent, Justine pleads her case (before the father as
judge, with Frankenstein in complicity by virtue of his silence)
and would identify with her true or fantasy mother. Thus she would reject
her evil, but actual mother (a version of Godwin's second wife)
yet be murdered in turn -- suggesting considerable hostility
toward an imitation of the good mother, and therein the denied
mother herself. Initially, however, to love Justine is to love
the self: an element of compensatory narcissism emerges. The
creature would love Justine, whom it finds less attractive than
the miniature of the mother. Yet to love the self which
imitates the mother is not sufficient -- this we know in virtue
of all our desires. Moreover, we know that our conscience, our
waking thought, would articulate those desires in horrific
terms. Therefore we betray the mother-identified self we would
love and deliver it up a victim to the father's law.
Simultaneously we demonstrate the paradoxical impotence of that
law and eliminate another rival for love of the mother --
self-love. Elimination of that obstacle leaves Clerval and
Elizabeth, and of course the hated fantasy father who, as the
most important antagonist, is most deeply repressed and dealt
with last. He is repressed into the disguise of ailing
benignity, but finally allotted a broken-hearted death.19 His death
sets Frankenstein free of the family. Only Ernest remains,
apparently of no significance, as Victor madly pursues his
passion.

{354} The third victim, Clerval, has the misfortune of
prospering concurrently with Frankenstein's decline. Moreover
he would draw Frankenstein away from the intimate family to a public family of
man. In Clerval, Frankenstein sees something of his former
self. That alone might arouse envy or hostility in the ever
constant desirer. More disturbing, however, is Clerval's
influence: he would draw Frankenstein away from his narrow
obsessions, nurse him to Clervalian health in the public world
of moral relations. This would mean the repudiation of
Frankenstein's basic desires. No wonder, then, that in a rage
of loss and desolation Frankenstein's creature strangles the
dear friend, the close companion of his childhood. Clerval
would become another silken cord of guidance; indeed, he would
become what he never was in Victor's childhood -- a subliming
influence. That place was and is still filled by Elizabeth.
Clerval comes too close to Frankenstein's inner struggle and is
killed in a moment of rage following bitter frustration. The
creature has just been rebuffed in its desire for the female,
for love and possession. In response it fulfills Frankenstein's
forebodings with respect to Clerval. Pity the true friend who
would wean his friend from an obsession the former has no
awareness of. Only Elizabeth remains, the center of childhood
solace.

The next victim pitches Frankenstein into near insanity. His
father's death makes madness virtual: "I lost sensation, and
chains and darkness were the only objects that pressed upon me"
(pp. 188-189). If we pity
Clerval, what do we feel for Elizabeth? The murdered bride is
victim of a tempest of sexual desire and anxiety. For Victor
the wedding night is "dreadful, very dreadful" (p. 185). Elizabeth falls victim
to incestuous desire for the mother she reincarnates.
Frankenstein even thinks of her as his consolation prize for the
task of creating the female creature.

Creating the female to satisfy the first creature is a giving
way to those "sympathies" which result in children. This is
the most trying of all in that it arouses every sexual anxiety,
desire and hope. We have moved from the creature's adoration of
Justine to its sexual demand for a female mate, and beyond to
Frankenstein's sexual anticipation of love for Elizabeth. {355}
If he was hypersensitive, guilt-ridden, unholy and profane
before -- when creating the first creature -- what must he feel
now as he contemplates the second one, the essential fulfillment
of his nightmare desires? He feels as if he has struck a
demon's bargain, and when "enfranchised" from his "miserable
slavery," would claim Elizabeth and "forget the past" in union
with his more than sister. Yet the prospects ahead become his
only reality. All else seems a lifeless dream. Far from
forgetting the past he is mastered by its desires. Distance and
isolation displace recognition of what he does -- attempt the
recreation of the mother who could never deny her creator-son.
This is, I think, the basic significance of recovering and
thereby recreating the mother -- the archetypal female
-- to love. However, Frankenstein fails. He cannot steel
himself to this "detested" toil. He knows too much despite his
lack of all but fevered insight. Indeed, he sees the very
creature whose presence he had suspected for some time, complete
with its ghostly grin, just as he emerges from a crisis of
guilt. Recoil from that physiognomy brings Frankenstein to
destroy the creature "on whose future existence" the wretch
depended for happiness (p.
159).

What has happened? The ultimate object has been relinquished as
unrealizable, but desire still lives, although receiving its
most bitter wound. In Mary
Shelley's allegory of psychic caverns, evil demons fly loose
with a howl. Clerval is the first victim; Elizabeth the next.
In strangling her the creature essentially says to
Frankenstein: 'if I cannot love and possess, neither can you
who would have your wife and deny me, to whom you owe
everything.' This is id having its vengeance upon the ego. In
the midst of this we find the last childhood compromise
removed. Elizabeth's death frees Frankenstein from his
childhood agreements. But such freedom is not happiness or
health. Frankenstein pitches into a final process of
self-disintegration, in which he pursues his own obsessions to
the death. As it were, one obsession seeks the death of
another. Elizabeth, the nearest to mother alive, is killed in
an overdetermination of desires. Anxiety, jealousy,
frustration, revenge -- all sexual -- join the still virulent
wish for the "real" mother
no actual or surrogate or compromise {356} mother can satisfy.
The result is a nightmare pursuit, after the father's contingent
death, of self after self in an ice- bound but fragmented
psyche. Frankenstein never heals, never recovers. He is
restored long enough by Walton -- to whom the entire central
narrative is told -- to tell his story of disintegration. As
for Mary, in Elizabeth's death she seems to sacrifice an image
of herself as composite daughter, wife and mother to the
creature's rage and Frankenstein's obsession. In doing so she
removes herself from any obvious role in the final course of the
narrative. Her position in subconscious desire of the father is
left behind -- although a ghost of it may remain in the
relationship between Walton and his beloved sister, to whom he
returns -- and her deeper orientation toward the idealized
mother drops out of fictional view. Now we will face only the
main conclusion to Frankenstein's obsession: from which Mary has
largely distanced herself.

Throughout the novel, Walton serves as a potential Frankenstein
who remains redeemed. By heeding his crew members (who defied
Frankenstein's desire to push on into the icecap in search of
the creature) Walton eschews Frankenstein's fate without ever
bringing the deep lessons of Frankenstein's narrative to
consciousness. But perhaps the latent listener in Walton has
heard enough of Frankenstein's unconscious, has penetrated the
dream Frankenstein recalls. Whatever the case, Walton consents
to return from his own pursuits, to eschew his voyage of
fantastic discovery to the north pole (thereby saving his life
and his crew from the severe cold, starvation and crushing ice
which would have been their fate) and return to his dear
sister. Walton finally chooses human connection as against
psychic glory. His is the wise choice, Mary would have us
believe, one for which he has been fit all along. Despite his
similarities to Frankenstein, Walton has never either lost
connection with other humanity or developed an uncanny
obsession. Perhaps the two figures manifest concomitant aspects
of the same spiral: Frankenstein spins regressively into
madness; Walton grows into a moderate sanity. He is not fully
purged of his promethean
desires -- perhaps we never are (which underlines the tragedy
inherent in Mary's criticism of Romantic quests) -- but he
somehow {357} turns away from a regressive pursuit into madness
and reasserts human connection. Apparently Mary finds that
civilized affections, however much they appear as the shadows of
dangerous loves (Walton's compensation is the love of his "dear
sister "), can sustain us this side of despondency.

If Mary offers an antidote to Frankenstein's fate, it is neither
an obvious nor an easy one. She glimpses the intractability of
personal desire in contradistinction to the humane tractability
of participatory community -- if only with one other person.
Perhaps this is part of her insistence on what we might call
hippocratic love: manifested in those devoted attentions
certain characters show to others -- Caroline to her father,
then later Elizabeth, then Justine to Caroline, and Elizabeth to
the doubly stricken family after Justine's death. Often the
women would nurse their men
and the redeemed men -- Clerval and Walton -- are nurses to
Frankenstein. In psychic allegory, one reading of a nurse's
solicitous love for the patient answers to the child's demand
for singular attention and therein possession of the mother in
her devotion. In this even Walton and Clerval become versions
of the desired mother for Frankenstein.20 But they are more for Mary
Shelley: they hold the promise of redemption from psychic
tyranny in a turn outward from the self toward others, toward
the wide world of men and women in communities of achievement.
Perhaps, as we recover from Frankenstein's catastrophe, this is
not enough. Of course we would have more. Why or how are we to
settle for less than our desires demand? Mary's answer, I
think, is that we have little choice: if we continue to pursue
what we have lost -- our mothers, our babies, our archaic loves
and hates -- we shall never grow up, indeed, we shall grow mad.
This, however, is held in the face of another recognition: that
Walton as a solution is only a framework, an idealized ending
which by the very force of idealization reveals the strange
attraction of promethean desires. Walton too would defy his
denying father, consign his crew to death, and even abandon
{358} his sister -- with whom he has an incestuous relationship
sublimated into epistolary tenderness. And though he relents,
against Frankenstein's wishes (his double), those desires have
not been either plumbed to the fullest or happily resolved: only
banished from the healthy ego in anything like their original
form. That banishment is good if we would not murder the
Clerval in us; but those desires still haunt us in their distant
exile. The creature Frankenstein pursued does not die at
novel's end: it disappears into the darkness.

1. Avoidance is characteristic of criticism
devoted to the novel. See George
Levine, "Frankenstein and the Tradition of Realism,"
Novel 7 (1973), 14-30 for an awareness of the family
patterns; Christopher Small, Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein: Tracing the Myth (University
of Pittsburg, 1973) for the suggestion that Victor's dream
emerges, "so to speak from her [Mary's] mother's grave" (p.
191); and William Walling, Mary Shelley (New York:
Twayne, 1972) for an awareness of connections between biography
and Mary's fiction generally. The only concerted effort at a
psychoanalytic reading is Morton Kaplan's "Fantasy of Paternity
and the Doppelgänger: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,"
in The Unspoken Motive: A Guide to Psychoanalytic Literary
Criticism (New York: The Free Press, 1973), pp. 119-145.
Despite sensitive commentary on the Doppelgänger effect in
the novel, Kaplan deals poorly with the fiction as expressing
obsessions with paternity through Frankenstein. He must resort
to Freudian formulae much too often in the face of a too dense
and sometimes disparate text. No doubt fantasies of paternity,
especially fantasies of body creation, along with other material
accompany the dominant strand I will attempt to explicate in
some of its complexity. But other material cannot be explicated
in its own right without a conditioned understanding of some of
the centers around which a good deal of sometimes contradictory
motive material clusters.

2. This is true for Kaplan as well as other
critics. The tendency is to interpret psychological material by
formula, by fiat. Levine provides a
general case in point: "where did his decision to create the
monster come from? Mere chance. Evil is a deadly and fascinating
mystery originating in men's minds as an inexplicable but
inescapable aspect of human goodness" (18). Lowry Nelson, "Night
Thoughts on the Gothic
Novel," Yale Review, 52 (1963), 236-257, attributes
it all to "some inner perversity" by way of explaining the
desire "to be loved alone or an urge toward narcissism." He
ends with the safety of "fascination with the gratuitous pursuit
of one's evil nature" (247).

3. All citations are from Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein Or, The Modern Prometheus (New York: Signet,
New American Library, 1965) with an Afterword by Harold Bloom.
Page references will be given in the text (p. 74) in parentheses. The
present citation is indicative of the novel's inverted
landscapes: heights suggest depths, walls suggest spaces,
mountains suggest immaterial force.

4. A phrase taken from Mary Shelley's
Journal, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1947), entry for February 25, 1822, p. 236.
Frankenstein may not be Mary's first attempt at such
depths: her first novel undertaken after eloping with Shelley
was called Hate. And by her own account in the 1831 preface to
Frankenstein, she indulged in day-dreams during
adolescence which interested her far more than self-conscious
introspection -- this while in Scotland: "I could people the
hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age,
than my own sensations."

5. Of course, Mary does not write because of her
nightmare: it forms the central inspiration for a competitive
project she had already undertaken -- writing a horror story in
competition against Shelley, Byron and Polidori. Her critique of
the promethean spirit
reflects a subconscious reply to much of Shelleyan excess,
idealism and dissatisfaction. Perhaps Mary -- who in 1814 thought of herself
as bereaved without Shelley's love -- competes in
Frankenstein against Shelley's ideologies of love and
impassioned human nature, as well as his genius itself. But the
dream and therefore the central event of the novel remains her
own nightmare. To fully engage it, we need to know much more
than we do about female creation and birth fantasies, as well as
female psychology generally. The level of desire I attempt to
plot goes deeper than superficial masculine or feminine
patterns. It touches, I think, on the primitive child not yet
fully engaged in oedipal conflict, possessed still of
considerable oral hostility and body destruction anxieties: the
latter two surfacing in the making of the creature from
dismembered bodily parts and in William's attribution of
horrific orality to the creature. Mary's nightmare seems
sparked mainly by notions of reanimating the dead. I think it
purposes a recovery not only of archaic wishes but the objects
of those wishes especially. Perhaps the motif of oral hostility
reflects a primitive desire to ingest the love object, rage at
being denied, and a projection of the entire complex onto the
bad parent -- the ogre who would devour one.

6. Mary often expressed intense dislike for
Mrs. Godwin, who seemed to favor her own two children from a
previous marriage, never became a mother to Mary, and of course
usurped the father's attentions. (Mary also blames Mrs. Godwin
for either precipitating or aggravating her father's financial
troubles as well as his often cruel treatment of herself and
Shelley). A portrait of Mary's mother, however, always hung in
Godwin's library and Mary, in adolescence, used to study by her
mother's grave -- a quiet place away from domestic strife in the
Godwin household. It is there by her mother's grave that she
first receives Shelley's professions of love and listens to his
tales about his ogre of a
father and his troubles with Harriet.

7. See Mary's Journal, entry for March
19, 1815, p. 41.
Also note her dream of the dead coming to life, mentioned in a
letter dated March 5, 1817. The novel is
completed by this time, but clearly much of its central
psychological material has not been fully worked through.

8. Mary sees herself as essentially innocent in
these fictional projections; more, as abandoned in the midst of
devotion. Her relation to Mrs. Godwin is that of the
step-daughter to her cruel step-mother. See Helene Deutsch.
The Psychology of Women, Vol. II (New York: Bantam
edition, 1973), pp. 453-475 for an account of daughter
step-mother conflict given both psychological strife and
cultural expectations conditioned by pervasive fairy-tale
models.

9. By this time, Mary is in early adolescence
and competitive conflict between herself and Mrs. Godwin is
overt. Perhaps we should not overlook the presence of Fanny Imlay either, though Mary
is clearly the father's favorite. She is also more like
Frankenstein than Elizabeth: "my daughter is the reverse of her
[Fanny] in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat
imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is
great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost
invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty" (quoted
by Eileen Bigland, Mary Shelley [New York:
Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1959], p. 32). Bigland suggests
that Mary occasionally gives way to persecution mania throughout
her life -- perhaps related to projected hostility and feelings
of abandonment.

10. Posession (sic) by Victor suggests
something of the father by sexual identification. But since we
mainly understand Victor as desiring the mother, his intensity
of possession means to be possessed by that desire. Moreover,
he displaces the father here -- as Mary would for love of her
idealized mother. As we might also expect, Mary's first
childhood friend is a girl, Isabella Baxter, who also comes (so
Mary thinks) to reverence Mary's mother.

11. Justine is the third of four children; her
mother prefers the first two and takes an irrational dislike to
the child. Mary no doubt feels Mrs. Godwin's favoritism toward
her own two children as dislike for herself, the third of four
legitimate children in a mixed household -- though I suspect
Mary in this projection of herself counts the four children as
exclusive of William, Godwin's child by his second wife. Fanny
Imlay would then be the fourth child. Moreover, Justine's
mother seems a representation of Mary's occasional hatred of
Mrs. Godwin. The Portrait of the benign family probably draws
a superficial reality from Mary's life with the Baxters in Scotland.

13. She apparently wrote romances, poetry and
studied the picturesque countryside. Both levels of interest,
however, may exist in her daydreams. Such a split may also
distinguish Mary from Fanny Imlay as well as Mary Shelley from
her husband. We have Godwin's testimony for the one
and Mary's implied critique of Shelleyan excess (in the figure
of Frankenstein himself) for the other.

14. Her notebook with Percy Shelley testifies
to this. She likes to describe what they have seen, but rarely
seeks to penetrate deeply. However much she also feels
promethean urges, she would separate herself (sometimes
stoically) from Shelley's enthusiasms, especially those darting
vagaries which never find satisfaction -- even reflected in his
mundane life, such as suddenly taking a long walk.

15. We must credit its self-portrait. The
creature, although finally an unknown -- see L.J. Swingle, "Frankenstein's Monster
and Its Romantic Relatives: Problems of Knowledge in English
Romanticism," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 15
(1973), 51-65 -- is meant seriously in its professions of basic
good.

16. See the novel, pp. 70, 75 for links between
Caroline and William. The question of devouring is significant
for the creature. William imputes horrific orality to a
dominantly philosophical being. Perhaps this is not far-
fetched given the distinctive negative "philosophy" of "Evil
thenceforth became my good," which the creature adopts after its
"rape" -- murder of Elizabeth. Oral hostility may touch deep
body anxiety material such as castration fears, which the
creature in part substitutes for. Its creation defies not only
emotional loss but may represent a desire to give birth in whole
from out of oneself. From one perspective this may look
symptomatic of penis envy; from another perspective this may
look like a desire to create oneself independently of one's
parents -- those who so deeply divide one's emotional life. The
motive to repossess the mother through a recreation of archaic
desires along with their objects, however, gains the dominant
ground for all of this.

17. Just prior to receiving Elizabeth's letter,
Victor is deeply agitated by the thought that Clerval is going
to allude to "an object on whom I dared not think" (p. 61). The creature as secret is
much with Victor in the following days of recuperation.

18. Justine, the outsider, may also in part
reflect Fanny Imlay -- Mary Wollstonecraft's
illegitimate daughter. Fanny is dutiful, domestic, quiet --
quite unlike Mary Shelley. Mary and Shelley would befriend her
in their happiness but were taken by surprise when she committed
suicide in October, 1816 (perhaps after
discovering her illegitimacy). By then Frankenstein is
nearly half finished, but guilt over Fanny's forlorn death may
have formed itself into some of the sketch devoted to Justine.
Fanny, a potential rival for the father's love, nevertheless is
almost mocked by Godwin (but
this is unknown to Mary until Godwin writes to her shortly after
Fanny's death). Justine's circumstantial victimization may
reflect Mary's feelings of guilt; such victimization also
expresses something of Mary's own feelings about her life. In
the love connection, especially if for a moment we entertain
Fanny's expressed admiration of Shelley, we might also note Harriet's death -- a more
significant rival -- as a factor in Mary's psychic wars.
Shelley long ago bared his disappointment in Harriet when he and
Mary regularly met at Mary Wollstonecraft's grave-side. In 1814 Shelley became a
composite object of love for mother, father and lover in Mary's
worship of him. But I think the deaths in the family in
Frankenstein are much more tied to the Godwin household
than to Shelley's biography. Harriet is the more significant
rival in love in an ordinary romance (Shelley even invites her
to join himself and Mary in Geneva) but Fanny or Claire Clairmont may strike
more deeply and therefore closer to home in Mary's
subconscious.

19. Clerval may in part bespeak Claire (Jane Clairmont) -- the
Shelleys' companion on two trips to the continent, mother to a
child by Byron, Shelley's walking companion
during Mary's confinement in anticipation of her first child,
and a locus for conscious jealousy in 1815 on Mary's part.
The broken father no doubt reflects something of a degenerate Godwin whom, despite all
appearances, Mary could not long despise -- no matter how badly
he treats her and Shelley.

20. The nurse
motif, however, has its yet darker side. All those nursed
eventually die, whether of disease, madness or old age, which
suggests considerable hostility toward the object of solicitude
-- the good father, mother, or friend.